Tomatillo Salsa

Ingredients

• 1 pound fresh tomatillos
• 1 large onion, cut into chunks
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 cup chopped cilantro
• 1/2 hot pepper, any kind you'd like
• 1/2 lime, juiced
• salt, to taste

Peel the tomatillos and scrub them until they're less sticky. They probably won't be COMPLETELY unsticky, but just do your best. Cut them into quarters and put them in a food processor. Put everything else in the food processor and pulse it until it's the consistency you want. I don't like my salsas super smooth, but whatever. Do anything you feel like doing. 

Put it all in a small saucepan and cook until the salsa is less watery. This might take a while. 

Chill it, then eat it.

Thoughts: Pretty legit, though we had to cook the salsa FOREVER for it to get less watery. Maybe next time I would chop the onion and then drain that sucker. Onions are watery, yo. But the flavor was pretty good. I wonder whether we would even cook it in the future. But maybe you have to cook tomatillos? Maybe we would blanch the tomatillos and leave everything else raw? Anyway, we used this as a substitute for enchilada sauce, and it was serviceable. 

Disaster Index: 3/10

Green chili pozole

This is almost too spicy?

Ingredients

• 2 cans hominy, rinsed and drained
• 1.5 lbs pork ribs
• 8 springs of flat-leaf parsley, tied with kitchen twine
• 4 garlic cloves
• 3/4 tsp dried oregano (preferably Mexican, says Martha, but seriously?)
• .5 lbs tomatillos, husked and rinsed well (they get pretty sticky)
• 2 jalapeno peppers, quartered
• 1 cup cilantro
  
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped (it's going into a food processor)
• 2 tbsp neutral oil
• salt

Place pork in large pot -- cover by 2" with water. Add parsley and garlic and bring to a boil. If any foam or fat rises to the top, skim it off with a ladle.
Reduce heat to medium low, and add oregano. Simmer, partially covered, until the meat is falling off of the bone, about 2 hours.
In the meantime, fill a small pot with water and bring it to a boil. Add your tomatillos and cook them in the boiling water for about 10 minutes, until the tomatillos are tender. Transfer them to a small bowl. Reserve some of the cooking liquid.
In a food processor or blender, add the onion, jalapeno peppers, cilantro, tomatillos, and as much reserved cooking liquid as you need to make the whole thing blend. Blend it until smooth. It should look like green chili.
Heat oil in skillet over medium-high heat. When it's hot enough to make you nervous, add the tomatillo mixture and 1/2 tsp salt, stirring constantly. It will probably spatter a little. Use a spatter shield.
Reduce heat to medium and simmer gently, stirring almost constantly (if you have pots like we do), until the mixture is thick, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.
The pork might be done by now. If it is, remove it from the broth (reserve the broth) and trim any excess fat from it (we didn't have any to trim). Remove the meat from the bones (which should be pretty easy at this point). Shred meat. Remove the parsley from the broth and throw it away.
Stir tomatillo mixture into the reserved pork broth and bring to a boil. Add the shredded pork.
Reduce heat, and simmer gently until heated through. If you just took the pork from the broth, this really shouldn't take long.
Add the hominy. Simmer until heated through, about 5 minutes. Season with salt or pepper to your heart's content.
Eat.

Thoughts: This was a pretty involved recipe, actually. There must be a way to simplify it. We'll see. This was pretty good -- I was hoping it would be JUST SLIGHTLY more flavorful. I think the pork ribs we used were not super fatty, and they probably could have been. In the future I would choose a less lean cut. Although a healthier thing to do might be to cook everything in pork broth instead of water. Then you would get a more savory flavor without the extra fat. Just a lot of extra sodium. TOTALLY WORTH IT, KIDS. The hominy adds a really interesting flavor. I have never really eaten much hominy before, but I would like to be eating more of it. The heat is of a proper intensity. Dan says "delicious" about the whole affair. Good.

Disaster Index: 1.5/10

Chicken and Tomatillo Chimichangas

Ingredients

• 8 small skinless chicken thighs
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• scant 2 cups drained canned tomatillos (12 oz can works fine)
• 14 oz cooked pinto beans (also from can is fine)
• several large tortillas
• several ounces of grated pepper jack cheese
  
• oil, for frying
• salt and pepper

Thaw chicken. Put in a large pan, and add water to cover. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked. You can go ahead and skim the schmaltz off the top if you want.
Remove the chicken, transfer to a plate, let cool, then shred. We usually use two large forks for this business.
Heat the oil in a frying pan. Fry onions until translucent, then add the garlic and spices and cook for 3 more minutes. Add the tomatillos and beans. Cook over moderate heat for another 5 minutes. Make sure to be stirring constantly throughout this whole process. It gets pretty sticky.
Add the chicken and the seasoning (salt and pepper, in this case).
Heat the tortillas in a microwave until they're very pliable. This is important. They cannot be chilly or room temperature. They must be either warm or hot.
Spoon a smallish amount of the filling into the center of the tortilla and sprinkle the grated cheese on top. It should take up about 1/4-1/5 of the tortilla.
Fold in the sides, followed by the top and the bottom. Secure with a cocktail stick or a skewer or something. This is actually sort of tricky. Just improvise.
Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the chimichangas in batches until they're crisp. They should get a nice golden color. If the cooked part is pretty dark and the rest of the tortilla is still white, the heat is too high. Turn it down.
Remove them from oil, drain on paper towel, and eat.

Thoughts: Absolutely delicious. I think they could have used a little more salt (possibly in the form of chicken stock). They were pretty easy to make though. I think we should have gotten bigger tortillas. We got small ones, but like, fajita or burrito-sized tortillas would have been better. It was pretty difficult to get them to fold up completely, and even more difficult securing them with a skewer or cocktail stick. Just be prepared for this. They are delicious for breakfast also. Also, we had WAY more filling than we knew what to do with. We only had enough tortillas for half the filling. I would go ahead and use fewer chicken thighs. You could probably go ahead and cut that number in half and you would be fine. Also Dan thought it could probably use some more cheese. He also thinks a mole sauce would work well with it. We actually have some mole sauce in the back of our fridge, but at this point, I wouldn't go near it. Cilantro would also be a good addition. Dan also says maybe we could put zucchini in it, but I'm not convinced.

Disaster Index: 1/10